Amazon.com Inc. introduced an image recognition service, a speech-to-text service dubbed Polly and “Lex,” which will let customers build conversational apps similar to its Alexa voice-activated platform....More

Microsoft Corp. struck a partnership with Elon Musk's artificial intelligence research group, OpenAI, and said the organization will use the company's Azure cloud system for most of its large-scale experiments....More

Give Microsoft credit for announcing what they're going to do, then doing it -- or at least planning on doing it, if the website hijinks of Monday, November 14, are any indication. Today, briefly, a page went live announcing that Visual Studio would be made available for the Mac platform. This is a big deal because it's one more sign that Microsoft is pushing its constellation of products and services away from a Windows-centric world....More